How To Play Fantasy Football, Only With Authors

Very soon, all over the country, in suites at the Bellagio, party rooms at Hooter’s, and your mom’s basement, groups of nerds will gather for a sacred annual autumn ritual: the fantasy football draft.

But what if you could play fantasy “sports” with something less concussion-causing? Like, for instance, books!? Gather your friends, because now you you can! What follows is an outline for a fantasy authors game that promises to be both fun and infuriating — just like real fantasy football (oxymoron alert!). Of course, you can tweak this general outline however you want. Let’s get to it!

Drafting: Your league should consist of you and your seven other biggest book dorkiest friends. (So that’s 8, right? Right.) To begin, draw straws, role dice, compare your moms’ ages, or employ some other system for determining draft order. Then, take turns picking authors in that order from each of the eight groups below. Your team must have one author from each group (similar to fantasy football where you can only start one QB, two RBs, etc.) Keep in mind, you don’t have draft in the same sequence as the categories. For instance, the player with the first pick is well within his/her rights to select David Mitchell from Group C (or Stephenie Meyer from Group H, or whatever hell s/he wants to do), but s/he cannot select any other authors from Group C for the rest of the draft. Continue taking turns drafting until all authors have been selected. There are 64 authors listed, and so if you play with eight teams, that’ll mean each team consists of eight authors — again, one from each group. (We may be bookish folk here at the Riot, but if pressed, we can hold our own in the maths.)

Group A — The Rookies: 2014 Debuts

Group B — The Wizened Veterans

Edan Lepucki

John Irving

Stephan Eirik Clark

Philip Roth

Andy Weir

Toni Morrison

Roxane Gay

Cormac McCarthy

Mira Jacob

Alice Munro

Alena Graedon

James Salter

Tiphanie Yanique

Joyce Carol Oates

Anthony Breznican

Alice Walker

Group C — Future Hall of Famers

Group D — Hipster Delights (“Cool” before they were cool)

Group E — Foreign Fantastics (writers in translation)

Jhumpa Lahiri

Dave Eggers

Haruki Murakami

Jonathan Franzen

Zadie Smith

Amy Yamada

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Emily Gould

Paulo Coelho

David Mitchell

Lydia Netzer

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Donna Tartt

Joshua Ferris

Kyung-sook Shin

Marilynne Robinson

Teju Cole

Herta Müller

Richard Russo

Cheryl Strayed

Orhan Pamuk

Neil Gaiman

Jonathan Safran Foer

Amos Oz

Group F — Young Adult Adults

Group G — Genre Gigantics

Group H — Series Heavyweights

Rainbow Rowell

Stephen King

George R.R. Martin

John Green

James Patterson

J.K. Rowling (Robert Galbraith)

Sarah Dessen

Janet Evanovich

Diana Gabaldon

Marcus Zusak

Catherine Coulter

Daniel Silva

Gayle Forman

Danielle Steele

Stephenie Meyer

Veronica Roth

Nora Roberts

Nelson DeMille

Stephen Chbosky

Dan Brown

Meg Cabot

Rick Riordan

Brad Thor

W.E.B. Griffin

Rules for Scoring: Agree on a firm start and stop time for the game — may we suggest, totally arbitrarily, August 1st through May 31st, 2015. Scoring is based on the system below — when an author on your team fits one of the descriptions, you get the designated number of points. As in real fantasy football, draft players whose situations fit best with the scoring system. Do research. Some of these events/things we know will happen. Most we don’t. Some are longshots (more points awarded for these), some may happen weekly. So draft wisely. (Also, add your own ways to score points. These are merely suggestions.)

All judgment calls (i.e., the exact definition of “major”, is this really a feud?, etc.) are left to the discretion of the league commissioner. (You designated a league commissioner, didn’t you?) So, without further adieu, here’s how to score: